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Warning: Strong description of animals in terrible condition.***I was in a really bad place, emotionally, physically, and financially. This isn’t one of your “I found a dog and fell in love with it” stories; it’s almost opposite.I had been with someone who broke several bones in my face, leaving me to die in a vacant apartment. When he returned four days later, and I was still alive, he drove me to the hospital and literally dumped me there. It was too late to set my nose. I had a brain injury, and my left eye still doesn’t open correctly to this very day.Depression gripped me.I guess people’s depression manifests in different ways. Some overeat, some sleep all day, some turn to street drugs, etc. For me, I just couldn’t eat. I felt sick to my stomach about ending up in this situation, and physically, food made me nauseated. This graduated into full blown anorexia. I knew I felt better when I didn’t eat, and without even making a conscious decision, I just avoided food.As time passed, the feeling of starvation became painful. I couldn’t sit down without striking my tailbone. Bile surged into my throat. My hands and feet turned blue because I was always cold. At night I would turn on my side, only to be bruised because there was not enough flesh to protect my hip bones. The stomach pains of hunger eventually went away, but by then I found myself clinging to the sense of control I had. I couldn’t leverage control over the loneliness. But when I remembered the times I felt ashamed for being overweight, finally having power over that was stronger than the physical agony of starvation.When you starve, eventually the brain becomes foggy. It’s difficult to think clearly. I wasn’t easy to get along with when I did encounter people which wasn’t often. Who wanted to be around an anorectic, whiney jerk? Irritability, impatience, and anger were the only reachable emotions, but they at least kept me from shutting down, going off the radar. I just had enough energy to be angry and lash out.I had a rickety jalopy that wasn’t paid off, and overnight it was repossessed. With only a high school diploma and my obvious state of being, there wasn’t much in the way of well-paying jobs, so I accepted the first one that was offered. It was at the SPCA. My dad agreed to help me with transportation.I learned my job duties: clean all the kennels in the morning; disinfect; assign impounded animals to kennels, inspect them; euthanize as directed. $5.15/hour.It was hard work, to say the least. The euthanasia was as humane as possible and only took a few seconds. I came to understand that sometimes it truly is the kindest thing you can do for an abused, broken animal that is beyond help.*Warning - disturbing description-The first day, I saw a refrigerator and opened it to store a drink. The head of a Doberman Pinscher sat on a shelf facing me. I learned that most animals which were suspected to be rabid were euthanized and tested at the Health Department. Since the rabies virus lives in brain/nerve tissue it was necessary to preserve the animal’s head until the laboratory picked it up. These duties had to be done on autopilot; no thinking. Sometimes we used gallows humour as a stress-reliever. The truth is that it was the public that allowed the animals to end up in such horrible states of pain; we just did the dirty work to end the agony. Despite us just being the people who gave these creatures deliverance from evil, often we were demonized as a “kill shelter,” as if we were psychopaths.I never euthanized an animal that wasn’t already dying or actively suffering without a chance for survival. They were all in the last stages a heartworm infection, sometimes Parvo, lingering between life and death from cachexia (body wasting, self cannibalization from starvation) or catastrophic injuries.About 9 months into the job I was still wasting away mentally and physically. There were days when I calculated how much of euthanasia the solution I would need for myself.Some days I was assigned euthanasia first. Some days I polished up dogs who would be adopted. Some days I helped cremate.Since I was pretty emotionally shut-down I didn’t get attached.Lots were adopted and that was a happy ending for them. But I often subconsciously identified with the dogs that were deemed un-adoptable. They could not accept affection; they lashed out. They had injuries from abuse or dog fighting. Obsessive behaviours. And many, many were in advanced stages of starvation. Sometimes we had to keep these dogs in kennels for months, despite their suffering, because they were evidence in court cases.I didn’t have to guard my emotions or try to avoid getting attached. There were no emotions to guard.An animal control officer brought in a very aggressive mixed-breed, maybe red-nosed pitbull and Labrador Retriever. Greasy red fur everywhere except a flash of white on his chest with a few red freckles. Overgrown nails. Fleas. Ticks. Skeletal.His ribs were so prominent that it looked as if you could play the xylophone on them. His vertebrae only had the barest stretch of leathery skin holding them together.And he was angry.The officer had him on a noose pole, which the dog somehow had the energy to thrash at and bite. The officer said he was found tied under a trailer. I took the pole from him and led the dog to a kennel that I had prepared with fresh water. As I was scooping kibble into a bowl, the officer said, “ I wouldn’t bother. He’s not going to last long.”The dog was labeled #58.Something flipped in my head. I suddenly found myself very angry at the protocol. Yes, he would probably be euthanized or die on his own in a matter of a day or two. I knew that. But this was the Society for the Protection of Cruelty Against Animals. How could we make that claim and leave an animal in our “care” to languish in more pain?No. His suffering needed to be contained. Immediately. If he died overnight, fine. But I would not accept that we would simply perpetuate the anguish until he stopped breathing.58 had other plans, though.He was not going to let me put the bowl in the kennel Like me, maybe the hunger pain faded and only left room for despair. He bared his teeth, growled, snapped, even obsessively bit the chain-links in a rage. It was impossible to breach the kennel door without being attacked. My sudden irritation with the officer’s instruction to “not bother” waned. How could I give the dog any relief if he wouldn’t let me give him a bowl?It was getting late in the day and I had to figure something out before the shelter closed. Between cleaning and shutting down the crematorium, I tried to think how to perform due diligence in stopping the cruelty. My thoughts were strictly at an administrative, task-oriented level; not emotional. But in the back of my mind I was acutely aware of how painful it must be on the dog’s protruding bones to lie on concrete. How anger was probably the only state of mind he could reach, and in attacking, his instincts were still exhibiting a need for self-preservation.He was not ready to die yet.Despite it being against my instructions, I devised a plan. I took the bowl to the enclosure, lied down on the stinky concrete, and one-by-one poked kibble pieces through the gap at the bottom of the cage. There was a drainage canal there for cleaning, so the kibbles weren’t always successfully making it within the reach of #58. He wasn’t interested in the food, anyhow. He just focused like a heat-seeking missile to destroy me. Slobber flung in my face. He literally foamed at the mouth. His bit through his own jowls, puncturing his lips and bleeding but he was unfazed. I tried to unlatch the door again but he lunged, hackles raised, lowered head, ears pinned back warning me with an insidious, low growl. I wondered if he was rabid.Maybe getting him to eat would be merely a Pyrrhic victory. Useless. Maybe dying was the most I could hope for for this animal. He could not seem to be able to choose help. Unleashing rage was his only ambition until he collapsed in exhaustion.Someone called that the they were locking up, everybody out. I stayed on the floor, quietly. The dog’s barking just fell into the cacophony of all the other dogs, so nobody was suspicious. I didn’t have a car, so nobody noticed I hadn’t left. Not much of a life, so why bother anyhow? (My dad didn’t show up that night to pick me up, but that’s another story.)I really didn’t care. There was simply no motivation in me to go home, or even stand up. The cool concrete floor, although painful, was enough. I think that I was just done, ready to die, and if the dog died, too, at least we wouldn’t die alone.The noises from the darkened kennel died down, too. Now and then a growl between dogs that shared a cage. The sounds of dreams, whimpering, nails scraping the floor. The splashes of lapped water. A random howl. I just wanted to fall asleep and not wake up.#58 eventually settled, I could tell by the agonal snoring and sounds of congestion. Each time he exhaled, I heard gurgles, bubbling. Did he have pneumonia? something else that would kill him overnight? I couldn’t even care too much to wonder. Fits of sleep, shivering, restlessness kept reminding me that we were both not dead yet. I was growing angry at Death itself for taking so long. What more did Death need other than surrender? TAKE us, I thought. I just don’t care.The dogs woke before dawn, before anyone arrived. #58 found some of the soggy pieces of kibble that he had shunned the night before. He picked one up and sniffed around for another, like he was playing Connect The Dots with each bit. I reached in the bowl and lethargically tossed a couple more pieces through the gap. He didn’t look at me, he just kept his nose to the floor, hesitating after each morsel, listening for where the next one would land. Under the bench. By his tail. On top of the bench. In the drain canal. Bounced off his back. In front of his face. Between his cage and the next.Since re-feeding a starving animal too fast can make it sick, I stopped short of a half cup or so. I forced myself up, brushed off my clothes, and dragged toward the bathroom to disguise my disheveled self. Nobody noticed - I mean, it’s not like kennel staff wore power suits just to get dirty.The day began - business as usual. Clean, disinfect, euthanize, walk, adopt, call the laboratory to pick up a head. Rinse and repeat.My range of emotions was still flatlining. I tossed kibble pieces into #58’s kennel on the sly and kept moving. I could refill his water just by spraying the hose through the chain links.Another staff member stopped me one day and said, “Something up with that dog. He keeps following you. Literally, everytime you move, he is , like, stalking you. I’d stay away from that one.”From about 5 rows in the front, I turned my head to see 58 up on his hind legs on his bench, staring at me with yellow eyes. He made no sound. I moved to another row, and looked again. His eyes followed..The next day, it became a running joke, that this monstrous, aggressive saw me as a “walking pile of bones to chew on.”Almost every time I looked over my shoulder, his front claws were gripping the chain links for support so he could stand on the bench and watch me. It was starting to annoy me, but I kept slipping him more food.I still held the belief that he was in a shelter and there was a *duty* to relieve him of the twisting pain of starving to death. If not, what was the point of taking him out from under the trailer? If we didn’t do our job, how were we any better than the people who tied him up?Meanwhile, his case was on hold for five days. The decision had to be made if anyone would be prosecuted for his abandonment and neglect.Clean, disinfect, euthanize, walk, adopt, call the lab for a head. Day in and day out.My turn to euthanize. Staff brought the animals in the room, often tearfully, insisting upon staying with each animal, comforting it in its last moments.Now and then I went to the front of the building, cutting through the kennels. #58 kept tracking me with his eyes.I took a break, sat in the sun outside, and ate exactly a half cup of rice, 2 grapes, and some water. After warming up in the sun (I was still constantly cold) I went back to work in the euthanasia room and found #58 tied there. Everybody was too afraid to stay with him because of his aggression, and I didn’t want to be left alone with him, either.Back on auto-pilot, I called someone to help wrap his snout with a leash so that he couldn’t bite. I administered a sedative to relax him, let him go to sleep before actually putting him to sleep. Within a few minutes he was very groggy. I prepared 30cc of the euthanasia solution, while the other staff member released the leash from his snout and laid #58 on his side. All I could think was that one of us would get relief from our hopeless, broken lives.I found the vein running along his forearm and waited for him to drift off so I could help him die without suffering.His tongue lolled out of his mouth, to the floor, a sure sign that he was deeply relaxing. And as I gripped the skin near the elbow to make the vein easier to see, out of the corner of *my* eye I saw the white of the inside corner of *his* eye. Too weak to lift his head, he shot a quick glance with his eye up at me. His amber eyes kept haunting me. Why wouldn’t stop watching me?The other staff member said, “You have to take him.” She didn’t try to say why, she didn’t remind me that he watched me everyday. She just said it like it wasn’t an option.“You have to take him.”I didn’t want a dog. I could barely take care of myself, let alone another being. But my mind wasn’t able to make decisions anymore, it was just blank. I was devoid of self-determination. I did what I was told and moved on.I released his arm. I don’t remember what I did with the syringe.Without excitement, we discretely smuggled 58 away from the room, to a part of the garage where he could recover from the sedative in a rarely-used cage.By the end of the day, another staff member bagged up some kibble and agreed to transport him to my house.The next morning he was alert. His aggression toward me vanished. He waited eagerly for food, but would only be hand-fed, piece by piece.And I thought, “If he can eat after all this, maybe I can. Maybe we can start to eat together.”I’m not saying there weren’t set backs. He had lungworms, whipworms, every worm but heartworms. I had liver problems and feared loss of control and weak bones. He never really could tolerate other people, especially kids.But we ate. Together.Crumb by crumb.We got stronger.My depression and loneliness still haunts me. I still have a terrible “relationship” with food, but I eat. I’ve never needed hospitalization for starvation since then. Whatever I ate, I saved the last bite for him.This is #58, renamed “Chou Chou” (Shoo-Shoo. Sort of a pet-name for a child in French.)This photo was taken 12 years later, after we travelled from Maryland to California, through the southern states to Florida. His muzzle grew frosty white hair in his old age, and his kidneys failed. A vet peacefully euthanized as I held him and thanked him for holding on until the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute.

Great question.But in order to answer it, one has to clarify what or whom you mean by God…? And to make things more confusing, one can answer this question on two levels:A) When you say ‘God’, which God do you refer to? Is it the Abrahamic God of the Judeo Christian traditions? Is it any of the 33 Million Gods inhabiting the many realms in Hinduism? Is it the Earth Mother Goddess, in all her different forms, worshipped in more ancient times (and before our societal hierarchies been kidnapped by what only can be termed as ‘toxic masculinity’)? Or Baayami, the great aboriginal sky God? Maybe it is Huitzilopochtli - the Aztec Sun God, or his Egyptian counterpart Ra?In other words, it seems that if you look through human history as it unfolds, we have a multitude of tales, myths, spiritual traditions and colorful depictions for the being that we refer to as God.These stories stretch in their attributes on a scale from the temporal to the ethereal, from the feminine to the masculine, from the local to the omnipresent and omniscient, and so on. But interestingly, all of them inhabit one way or another a concept of a greater being of sort to whom we have a relationship, capturing our hopes and aspirations, our fears and worries.In order to have a clearer understanding of the role this relationship (and note that I am not talking about understanding ‘God’ per se), a useful enquiry is to consider the idea of theology of any sort as (what is called in coaching parlance) - ‘an organizing question’. A way to string our understanding in a coherent model which makes sense (to us) in a way that translates to practices we adhere to and ethics we live by.You can think of it as an architecture of sort. A blue print to help us construct an understanding, making the universe around us sensible, predictable, less confusing and more friendly.Thus, in the so-called learning curve of 'Let's figure out what makes the Universe tick?', you could suggest that the religion of Hunters & Gatherers, largely denoted in Animism - projecting the idea of a deity onto trees and animal spirits etc. - can be seen as the entry level “Architecture 101″. Then, in the continuum of how our understanding of the unseen forces shaping our one could think of modern religion (read largely removed from the natural world) as “Architecture 102”. Further along in history, the deeper philosophical practices and debates on consciousness within religion (primarily Eastern, but certainly not limited to) could be considered “Architecture 201”.In this analogy, we can call Science “Architecture 301” - because in science we have taken explaining 'how things work' to a new level. The difference to any of the preceding efforts we made to develop our understanding is that science self-corrects. When a technological breakthrough, or a brilliant mind, facilitates a ‘better’ explanation, the new understanding replaces the old and no one argues that our preceding idea is written in stone and therefore immutable. As such, it will not ossify into a stilted religious narrative which is fixated in a story from long time ago.Which is the core issues with all depictions of a fixated God model. How do we know it is ‘true’? A book, or some religious figure, or our parents/community, tell us that this is the way things are and we believe them.It is true that people from all backgrounds and walks of life can have a religious experience, which in their own experience can confirm a story they were told. But whichever way you look at it, the experience is intrinsic to the believer. S/he might have the experience of being told by someone “God is [fill in the blank]”, or s/he actually has the experience of ‘God is [fill in the blank]’. Either way, it is a subjective experience that does not stand alone on its own merit.For example, if you were the only religious person in your community, and you did not tell anyone about it, where is the validity of your belief other than in your own head and heart. Even if you had a personal encounter with God, no one will know about it - let alone believe in it, unless you gave them the details, which makes them a secondary - non-intrinsic - experiencer of your ‘truth’…Actually, it is not that people do not believe in “God”. It is that some people, and thankfully more and more believe in a more sensible ‘Organizing Question’ (because look at the horrors perpetrated in the name of all religions throughout our history!).In subscribing to an architecture that self corrects, like science, we still don’t understand the entire universe - we’ll be fools to think that we do - indeed the latest in science concludes we only understand 4% of the universe’ constitution . And to suggest that God is in all the stuff that we cannot explain - what the American astrophysicist and cosmologist brilliantly calls ‘God of the Gaps’, is just as limited in its logic as the Flying Spaghetti Monster…B) The second aspect of answering the question of ‘what or whom you mean by God?’, pertains to the human experience as a sentient and conscious being.This is because whichever narrative or explanation you believe in - and in this sense even if you subscribe to science as your ‘religion’, it is still a model that you adopt as your guide - all of those are inherently structured around the experience you, me and everyone else have as it emerges in the relationship between an entity of sort that seems to be the a sense of self residing in the individual, and the external world.I others words, you can break every moment into a relationship between the self, the other, and the context - the situation - in which the moment unfolds. In other words, the experiencer, the experience and the form of experiencing which connects those two.It is in the exploration of this duality that we can start to develop a deep awareness of consciousness as it emerges through our experience, and possibly get a little more comfortable with the idea of a model of a “God” that really does go beyond the personal, is omnipresent, and amazingly, can delivers us from the daily trials and tribulations of what life is made of.This is beautifully summarized by a story from the teachings of a Thai Forest monk called Ajahn Buddhadasa. When asked to define what is Buddhism, he suggested that in the understanding of what Buddhism is about, one needs to look at two principles (organizing questions, if you will):First, is it ‘your own experience’? No one - not a person nor a book - has told you that this is how things are; andSecond, is the experience in some way or some form, ‘supports the alleviation of suffering’?Buddhadasa suggested that if you can apply these two principles, well, then this is Buddhism. As such, he removed the “religious” discourse from belief to process, and from narrative to practice.Amazingly, this is a sentiment all religions actually point to if you dig deep enough into their philosophy (NOT their story). It is not about an all powerful figure in the sky - or any of its equivalents. It is about our relationships with life and how can we strive to discover our better selves.

Ok, I’m going to share this disturbing story because at the end, there’s a point that pretty much everyone should know—for your own good. For your own safety.Nobody in the world knows about this besides my wife, and I only told her about it in 2016….16 years after we first met. I’ll spare you the literary fireworks and suspenseful prose and get to the point.This story is 100% true and not embellished.Fair warning: if you’re emotionally sensitive or easily shocked, please do NOT continue reading.My older stepbrother—we’ll call him Dan, my mom’s son from her previous marriage to a raging alcoholic and wife beater—was a disturbed individual. A problem child. All kinds of behavioral problems at school, violence, fighting, harassing girls, the works.He’d gone in for emergency evaluation several times by the age of 17. I’m not sure for what. My parents didn’t share those details with me. But if it was sudden, it had to be either self-harm or threatening someone else.Anyway.It was the end of May, 1988. I was 8 years old. Dan had just turned 15.We had one of those above-ground pools, the kind you drain and cover up in winter, then clean out and refill with water in summer.Well, it was almost June, and the weather had warmed up. So my dad sent me and my older brother outside this Saturday to uncover the pool and scrub it out so he could fill it up with the hose.We unhooked the cover and tossed it aside, and it seemed that at some point during the winter, a squirrel had found his way under the cover. He was probably seeking shelter from the brutal cold, then couldn’t climb back up the pool’s smooth sides, got trapped in there, and died. Poor squirrel =(I said I was going to get Dad to take care of it, and Dan said no, I got it. He went into the garage and came back with the snow shovel. You know, one of those 1980s metal snow shovels, the big rectangular ones.He clambered into the pool and scooped up the squirrel, then carefully climbed back over the side and started walking toward the trash cans sitting against the side of the garage.I felt relieved. Like…whew, that was sad. Glad that’s over.Then Dan called me over to the side of the garage.When I got there, I saw Dan had dropped the squirrel on the cement walkway. He said something like “Watch this,” or “Check this out”.He then proceeded to lift up the shovel and hack it down toward the squirrel’s neck like a guillotine blade. Up and down, over and over. Very vicious and deliberate.I was frozen. I felt like someone had glued my feet to the ground. I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t look away. It was like I had to keep looking to find out whether this was actually real or some kind of nightmare.Well, Dan did that for about 30 seconds—until the poor thing’s head was completely hacked off. Its skull was popping through its open mouth from the force of the blows, and its spine was trailing out from behind the ragged wound.He scooped up the head with the shovel and flipped it into the trash can. Grinning. I’ve never seen a sick grin like that ever again in my life, and I hope to god I never have to see one like it again. He just wasn’t there in his eyes. Something was there…but the person I knew as Dan was absent.Then he placed the shovel against the garage and sauntered away. He seemed to have forgotten about the pool, because he went into the house and didn’t come back out.I felt sick, penetrating nausea. I could feel it pulsing in waves all the way through to my spine. I was shaking and sweating and felt like I was going to faint. I don’t know how I manage to avoid throwing up, because I felt like it about 15 times. But in the end, I didn’t.I took the shovel and placed the squirrels body into the trash can, taking care to avoid looking inside. I couldn’t bear seeing that severed head again.I put away the shovel and sat down in the garage, and I just cried and cried. Fear, anger, outrage, sadness, confusion…I couldn’t control this carousel of pain and emotion. The wrongness of it. The ugliness. The disrespect and disregard. The almost joyful way Dan had defiled this animal, debased it, abusing its corpse for his sick amusement.This was not the world I knew. Not until this bright, sunny Saturday morning on the breast of summer. Now it was a world I knew, and I couldn’t run from it, couldn’t escape. I kept seeing that poor squirrel’s pathetic, rotting face and matted fur. This pretty little creature that had once lived and breathed and ate and played, treated like a pile of shit.It was disgusting. No, it was worse than that. It was unjust. Unfair. Disdainful. It was an utter absence of respect for life or death.I never told my parents. I never told anyone. I was terrified about what Dan might do if I squealed. As a devotee of mob movies, horror movies, prison movies and shows, and everything else centered on suffering, humiliation, pain, and anguish, Dan had long since adopted the phrase (spoken to me often, typically with an ugly snarl on his face), “Snitches get stitches”.Now I knew the depths of his sickness and depravity. Now I’d witnessed firsthand the level of corruption infecting his mind.Oh, I’d seen him behaving strangely plenty of times. Acting like a jagoff with his jagoff dropout friends. Taking off his disgusting reeking socks when he got home and shoving them in my little sister’s face. Drawing distorted faces in his school notebook and stabbing them with his pen until the tip broke—he’d do this over and over, sometimes breaking five or six pens at a time.Blasting Cannibal Corpse and other death metal music while punching his bedroom walls when our parents weren’t home. Ripping the pages out of books like Bender in The Breakfast Club (I had to replace To Kill A Mockingbird at least three times…it seemed to be one of his favorite targets for annihilation).Scrawling disturbing mottoes like ALL N—-GERS DIE and BURN F—-ING JEWS in the pages of his schoolbooks alongside crude swastikas and six-pointed stars, probably imitating what he saw in Nazi documentaries (he loved those…the gorier the better) and the covers of Slayer albums.But now, it was all different.Now I knew he was genuinely dangerous.And from that moment on, I fully grasped his capacity to cause pain. Maybe even to kill. And there was no way I’d risk his wrath. Not after seeing that horrifying spectacle. No way.Well.Dan eventually got expelled from the next two high schools he attended. By the following summer, he’d quit attempting to further his education and got a job selling knives, ninja swords, illegal fireworks, and hardcore bootleg porn at the local flea market. He grew fond of putting these movies on the VCR when our parents weren’t home, then calling me into the room so I’d get a nasty shock seeing things I didn’t understand, but knew I wasn’t supposed to be looking at.Then followed a long period of getting married to horrible women, having kids with them, and abandoning them.Between the ages of 21 and 30, I was introduced to three infant nieces and one nephew, all born from different moms.Six months was the longest I knew any of them, because as soon as the baby was born, Dan would abandon the mom and move on. By the age of 35, he was tangled up in a grotesque web of alimony, child support, two personal lawsuits against him, and a pending charge of sexual battery for whipping his current wife with a video game controller cord.He’d handcuffed her to the bed (he was heavily into S&M…I know, I was shocked by that too, right) and ignored her safe word. By the time he released her, she was cut, bruised, and bleeding all up and down the back of her body, including some deep lacerations where the hard plastic plug had torn away chunks of skin.Oh…did I mention she was pregnant at the time?Shortly after, Dan went into the hospital because he was experiencing heart flutters, murmurs, something like that. Not surprising. Dan had been snorting coke and pumping himself with steroids for about 10 years at that point. He was a 6′3, 230-pound animal who’d break your ass for looking at him crossways. I can’t even tell you how many times he narrowly escaped arrest for beating up someone in a bar, at a baseball game, at a party, you name it. Like all psychopaths, he had an innate talent for manipulation and playing the victim very convincingly.Well, Dan passed away while under anesthesia, and they couldn’t revive him.It was December 18th. I remember because it was the day after my mom’s birthday. We all gathered at her house to be together and mourn.And I felt so…incredibly…relieved.The dragon was dead.See, I’d never quite gotten over all the crazy shit Dan had done during my childhood. The squirrel incident was just one chapter in a large book of other disturbing episodes, the tamest of which I described above.I’d never stopped being afraid of him.Every time I saw him, no matter where we were or for what reason, that evil grin was all I could see. Those dark gray clouds in his eyes that veiled any scrap of good judgment or humanity lurking inside him.I say with no hint of guilt that to me, his funeral was a celebration.Judge me if you will.You never lived with him.Never wandered down to the basement to play Nintendo and almost pissed your pants out of shock and fear because all of your little sister’s Barbies and Cricket and Teddy Ruxpin and Carebears were hanging by their necks from the sewage pipe like condemned criminals, motionless and noosed with pieces of your mom’s laundry line he’d cut up with her sewing scissors.Never had to sit there watching all the Faces of Death videos in the living room during winter break while mom and dad were out doing their Christmas shopping. Shaking and sick because he promised he’d beat your ass if you dared close your eyes or look away. I’m fairly sure he’d gotten this idea from A Clockwork Orange, one of his favorite movies. I had nightmares for months after that one, not knowing at the time those movies are 90% special effects from low-budget movies.Never found a pleasantly wrapped gift on your bed on your 11th birthday after school, then opened it thinking it was a surprise present from your parents or little sister, and discovering it’s a packet of of violent gang rape porn pictures he’d printed out and wrapped at some point.Never had to bear the harsh physical punishments and groundings from your dad because your older brother enticed you into the alley with some early fireworks on July 3rd, only to watch him light an entire pack of Black Cats and toss them into a full dumpster and cause a huge fire, with that same shark’s grin and empty gaze, and then threatening you with pain and humiliation if you dared tell your parents who’d really done it. So you have to take the blame and the punishment, not to mention watching your parents stress and worry because they’re concerned you’re going down the same bad road as Dan.Snitches get stitches.Never feared going to sleep at night, wondering whether you’d wake up someday with him standing over you, holding a knife or your dad’s acetylene torch and a lighter. Ready to do serious harm to your body for no good reason, just because it got into his head, like crossing paths with a rabid dog that’ll bite anything within reach. Wearing that skull’s smile. Those absent eyes gazing down at you, blank and lifeless. Like a doll’s eyes.Did he get in trouble for doing these kinds of things? Sure. But what can you do? Can’t throw him out of the house at 14 or 15 or 16. Can’t beat him into submission. Can’t commit him permanently, because he hadn’t done anything to justify that course of action.At least, not unless I confessed everything I’d seen him do. And there was no way I’d run that risk…and he knew I wouldn’t. So he had that power.I was glad he was dead.I still am.Guys, girls, friends…you need to speak up.Please…please do not let this sort of terrible behavior continue unchecked. If you witness anything like this happening…especially someone harming animals or people, starting fires, causing someone humiliation, or anything that disturbs you…you need to tell someone.Don’t be the coward I was. Because not only did my terrified silence hurt other people—it hurt me too. Maybe I could have helped put a stop to it and saved a lot of people a lot of pain later in life…including myself. I could have prevented the trauma and destruction. I could have saved a few more fatherless kids the anguish of growing up without a dad. And I could have saved myself from the paranoia, distrust, fear, suspicion, and nightmares that still plague me to this day.Speak up. Tell someone. They will believe you.Look for the helpers.Nobody needs any more nightmares. Not while they’re sleeping…and not while they’re awake. Because they don’t stop when you awaken or grow up. Take it from me—the flames are all gone…but the pain lingers on.The monsters are real. They’re out there right now, today, this very minute.They exist. But so do the helpers.And this is a true story.Rob